In this article, Mike O’Hara talks to Paul Reynolds of Bondcube, Peter Fredriksson of Baymarkets, Stu Taylor of Algomi and Andrew Bowley of Nomura to discuss ways the financial industry can work with the buy side to address some of the structural problems that have led to chronic illiquidity in the fixed income market, and looks at some of the technology initiatives designed to address these challenges.

Also, from the buy-side perspective, Gianluca Minieri of Pioneer Investments speaks with Mike about the issues buy-side that firms face in today’s fixed income market.

In this article, Mike O’Hara talks to Matt Barrett of Adaptive Consulting, and Tony Foreman and Eddie McDaid of Software AG, about how sales productivity at global investment banks can be significantly improved by bringing together four “pillars”: management information systems; straight-through processing; control; and pro-active outreach; and how this can be achieved through a combination of business intelligence and technology innovation.

Also discussed are how technologies such as streaming analytics, complex event processing, universal messaging and in-memory data management can be utilized to support these four pillars

In this article, Mike O’Hara talks to Ash Gawthorp, Matt Barrett, Andy Phillips and Dan Marcus about how technology challenges - particularly around performance – are being addressed as both the retail and the professional FX trading sectors adopt new trading platforms. Topics covered include:

- Performance of mobile trading apps, and replicating the end-user experience- Challenges around cross-platform development- Satisfying the needs of professional and institutional traders- Dealing with growth in message volumes- Can randomization prevent ‘gaming’?

In this article, Mike O’Hara talks to Mike Schonberg, Laurent de Barry, Nicolas Karonis and Henry Young about how and where FPGA technology is increasingly being used in low-latency trading operations, beyond the traditional areas of market data acquisition and distribution. Topics covered include:

- How FPGA is used to improve the efficiency of microwave networks- OS kernel bypass and TCP bypass via FPGA- Latest developments in pre-trade risk using FPGA- Measuring latency through instrumentation at the FPGA firmware level- Future possibilities with ARM core co-processors

In this article, Mike O’Hara, in conversation with Hirander Misra, Andrew Chart and Philip Simons – discusses the main challenges that buy-side firms face when trying to cost-effectively hedge their interest rate exposures in the post-G20 landscape. Topics covered include:

- How and why are swap costs increasing?- What are the challenges with swap futures?- What is different about GMEX's constant maturity approach?- Why is the diversity of market participants important?- Issues around clearing and post-trade operations

In this article, Mike O’Hara, in conversation with Jonas Bonér, Greg Young, Martin Thompson and Jan Machácek – investigates the core principles behind the recently published The Reactive Manifesto, and its relevance to system design in today’s Financial Markets. Topics covered include:

- Why is there a need for a Reactive Manifesto? - How does it apply specifically to financial markets? - Is it only relevant to trading applications or can it be applied elsewhere? - What are the challenges around wider adoption of the Reactive Manifesto? - Factoring in Conway's Law

Algorithmic trading has become ever more popular in recent years – accounting for approximately half of all European and American stock trades placed in 2012. The trading strategies need to be back-tested regularly using historical market data for calibration and to check the expected return and risk. This is a computationally demanding process that can take hours to complete. However, back-testing the strategies frequently intra-day can significantly increase the profits for the trading institution.

Russia’s central financial marketplace has evolved so rapidly that it is now primed to become a key international hub, and the finance organisations able to anticipate and quickly adapt to this fast-changing environment will clearly emerge as market leaders. This whitepaper discusses the current state of Russia’s electronic financial markets, and addresses the issues that need to be understood regarding infrastructure and connectivity challenges in Moscow.

Modern messaging, trading, and reporting systems require extremely low latencies, in the range of a few milliseconds, to meet customer expectations and strict service level agreements. This paper describes how to use new JVM technology to achieve maximum platform latencies of 1-2 milliseconds with very little tuning effort.